From Patricia Barber's first release, 1998's Modern Cool, we were besotted by her artistry. The album received a coveted five-star review in Down Beat and was included in Rolling Stone's "Top 100 Albums of the Century." In 2003, Barber was the first singer-songwriter to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship (to compose her song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphoses), and she is also famed for transforming pop songs into sleek jazz numbers. For Smash, her first album for Blue Note, we give a resounding "huzzah"!

"The most fearless, most intellectually stimulating and, by extension, most interesting singer-songwriter-pianist on the American jazz scene."—JazzTimes

"Like Joni Mitchell … Barber has taken the genre that is her natural form of expressiveness into dazzling new arenas of lyrical creativity."—LA Times